Small Mercies

18

Around the time Bobby and Carmen Davenport are ordering their first round of drinks at Jacob Wirth, Mary Pat Fennessy is watching Rum Collins and another stoner supermarket employee share a joint on the back of the loading dock of the Purity Supreme. Mary Pat is parked next door under a tree in the lot of a Henry’s Hamburgers that went under in ’72 when someone took a couple of the burgers to a lab and discovered they were a whole lot of horse and very little cow.

Two cars in the Purity Supreme lot — Rum’s Duster and a Chevy Vega that Mary Pat presumes belongs to his dope-smoking buddy. Everyone else is gone, including the security guard. They set the alarm inside, pulled the grates down, and locked them; that’s the full extent of the night security for the Purity Supreme.

Rum’s buddy produces a roach clip, and they huff the remainder of the joint, looking like a pair of fish as they do it, then swipe five with each other and walk to their cars. This is the tricky part. If Rum’s buddy lingers by his car or takes too long to start it, the whole plan falls apart. Everything depends on Stoner Pal pulling away before Rum starts his engine.

Stoner Pal gets in his car first, but he doesn’t start it right away. And now Rum is opening his own door and about to get behind the wheel. Mary Pat scrambles out of her car and searches around until she finds a rock the size of a Matchbox car. She hurls it high, like a pop fly, and for a moment she’s not sure if she threw it with any accuracy. But then she hears the distant whap of it hitting the roof of Rum’s Duster.

Rum gets out of his car. Stoner Pal, oblivious, guns his engine to life. He rolls down the window and asks Rum something. Rum is looking at his car roof. He looks around for any nearby trees. He holds up a hand to tell his friend it’s all okay.

And Stoner Pal drives off.

Rum looks around the parking lot. For a moment he even seems to be looking beyond the Purity parking lot into the old Henry’s Hamburgers parking lot. But he doesn’t look hard and he doesn’t look long.

He gets back in the Duster. Turns the key in the ignition. The engine rumbles to life.

And dies.

He tries again. This time there’s a noticeable lag before the engine kicks over.

And it immediately dies.

His next four tries get nowhere. Just a high-pitched whirring noise as the engine tries to engage with an empty gas tank. After she siphoned out all the gas, Mary Pat poured in a pound of brown sugar for good measure. The only way Rum Collins’s orange Plymouth Duster is leaving that parking lot is by a tow truck.

Rum gets out of the car. Looks under the hood. After a while, he closes the hood. Sticks his head back in the car. After a minute or so, comes back out. Goes to the back and slides under. He puts his ear to the gas tank, then raps his knuckles against it.

He stands, frowning. Does that for a bit. Looks back and forth at the gas tank a couple times.

He looks across at Henry’s Hamburgers. Boarded up. Driveway sporting weeds. Weeds under the phone booth by the old front door too. But it is a pay phone, and it is lit up.

Rum reaches into his pocket. Glances at what she presumes are coins in his hand.

He trudges across the Purity parking lot, cuts through the missing partition of sagging fence, and makes his way toward the phone booth. Mary Pat’s been idling the whole time, and she slips the gearshift into drive, rolls Bess slowly out of her parking spot, headlights off, depressing the gas pedal with increasing pressure, so that she’s almost on top of Rum by the time he hears the car and thinks to turn and look. She punches the gas and shoots around to his right, the front tire missing him by no more than a foot but the driver’s door swinging wide and hitting his body hard enough to lift him off his feet and chuck him over a patch of grass into the old drive-through lane (a first in the neighborhood; huge deal at the time).

By the time he gets to his feet, she’s bunched his shirt in her hand. He stumbles and wobbles as she drags him over a curb and through the side door of the restaurant, which she’d jimmied hours ago. She throws him to the floor in the remains of the old kitchen. When he tries to get up, she delivers a one-two-three-four combination to his face, relying on the vicious speed of it over any real force to break his spirit. Which it does. He lies back and groans and covers his face and drops the hands only when he feels her unbutton his jeans. Before he can stop her, she’s pulled his jeans and his Fruit of the Looms down to his knees and straddled him with a box cutter in her hand, one of the thin ones that looks like a large stick of Juicy Fruit but, he must know from his supermarket experience, can slice the top off a carton of canned goods like the cardboard’s made of tissue.

Before he can believe she’s really pulled his pants off, she’s already yanked his ball sac toward her and flicked the blade along the underside.

She’s going to venture a guess he’s never screamed so loud or so high in his life. The blood flows freely from the cut.

“Tell me everything about the night on the platform at Columbia Station.”

He tells her. Doesn’t stop until she’s fairly confident he’s told her everything he knows. He even tells her the parts that don’t reflect well on Jules, don’t make Jules look good at all.

When he’s done, she places her knees on his shoulders. Looks down at him for a bit. Casually, almost as if she’s curious what could happen, she flicks the razor blade off his throat and neck a few times. The tears, hot as tea, she presumes, flow from the corners of his eyes and down into his ears.

“You’re gonna kill me.”

“Thinking about it.” She shrugs. “Where’s Jules?”

“I don’t know.”

She flicks the razor off the flesh beneath his chin. “But you know she’s dead.”

He scrunches his eyes and the tears flood from them. “Yes.”

“How?”

“Everyone knows,” he says simply.

“Open your eyes.”

He does.

“You’re gonna call the police. And you’re gonna tell them what you told me. If you don’t, Rum, you listening? Say you’re listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“If you don’t, I’ll come back for you. Nothing will stop me. Nothing will save you. No matter what happens, Rum, no matter who you think you know or who you think can protect you, they can’t. Not against me. I’ll get to you just like I got to you tonight. And I will cut off your balls. Then I will cut off your dick. And I will throw them down a sewer for the rats to eat while you bleed to death where I leave you.” She stands. “Go out to that pay phone and call the police and tell them you want to confess to Auggie Williamson’s death.”

She starts to walk out and then stops. Turns back. Of all the beliefs she holds chambered in her heart, the one she holds dearest is the one she could now put at hazard simply by asking a question. It’s the belief that Jules was the best part of her. That Jules was better than her or Dukie or Noel. And that wherever her soul ended up, it ended up where the good souls go.

She clears her throat. “Those things you said Jules did — did she do them?”

Rum gets a look on his face like he knew he should have changed that part of the story.

“Did she do them?” Mary Pat repeats, enunciating every word. “Don’t fucking lie or I’ll know it.”

“Yes,” he says.

She stands in the doorway a long time, her lower lip quivering.

“Well, I raised her, didn’t I?” she says. “So I guess that’s my sin.”

She lets herself out.